Truth In Advertising

I get the complaint, but honestly, I don't see the problem here:

The Agriculture Department last week began mandating that millions of boxes of surplus food for needy families include a letter from President Donald Trump claiming credit for the program.

Look, if these assholes want to remind people of why they're in such a fix that they have to go to the fuckin' food bank, I say let them dig that hole.

Hey folks, hope you enjoy the Trump Box of charity food you need because the Trump Plague killed your gig economy McJob! Don't worry, we'll send you another letter taking credit when we kill off what's left of your health care!

More seriously, yes, the preening arrogance of this fucktard and his soulless minions, entreating the peons to lavish their gratitude upon Dear Leader for his beneficence, is as off-putting as the endless stack of other things that are at least as insufferable and intellectually dishonest. After all, fellow taxpayers, you and I paid for the food in that goddamn box, not Brokeahontas there. Like everything else in his waste of a life, he lets other people pay the money and do the work, and then he steps in and slaps his name [spit] on it and takes all the credit.

Are you pissed? Good. Take that with you into the voting booth. Keep it and nurture it, wield it against every piece of shit that ever carried his water or served as a flack for him. Nurse it like a Serbian grudge, and never let it go. Value your hate and disgust, and use it to keep warm on the long, cold, dark nights to come. Trust me, they deserve so much worse.

You want to be rid of these motherless fucks, like really and forever? That's what it's gonna take, and then some. Sorry, but that's what it takes when too many of yer fella 'murkins got fat, lazy, stupid, and complacent.

Vanish Armada

The ongoing national shitcom took a turn for the hilarious yesterday with the arrest and indictment of Meth Uncle Stevie B, along with several other shitheads, in a transparent money laundering scheme. I know, we're all shocked. The indictment is a pretty quick read, and I suggest you take a few minutes and peruse it.

Back in the Trump "University" lawsuit days, I opined (correctly) that the sort of schmuck who was willing to hand over their life savings to a cheesy huckster like Donald Trump deserved to lose their money anyway. They would have otherwise given it to a televangelist, or blown it on a sack of magic beans, or valuable moon acreage, some dopey shit like that.

That's not to say that Trump didn't also deserve to get sued, but I continue to live by the sacred adage that it is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money. That may not sit well with some folks, but that's really the way it is; whether we "like" it or not is orthogonal to that universal truth.

Anyway, take that principle and multiply it by several orders of magnitude with this "We Build the Wall" bullshit. Fuck every one of these people, right in their goddamned neck wattles. They deserve to get fleeced out of every dime they have. If they had actually worked hard to earn their money, they'd have more fucking respect for it.

So there's that. Every single person involved in this obvious scam deserves the worst. I reserve a smidgen of sympathy for figurehead Brian Kolfage, because he really did sacrifice his body for this nation. But by the context of his emails quoted in the indictment, he was at best a willing accomplice.

And he's going to pay, whether or not he does any time. The indictment specifically lists the boat Kolfage used in the stupid Dear Leader river "parade" in Tampa earlier this year, which (along with Kris Fucking Kobach being the scam's legal advisor) is so perfectly on-brand for this crowd it makes your teeth hurt. The only way it could have been better is if Kolfage had named the boat Stugots.

Speaking of The Sopranos, fellow indictee Andrew Badolato appears to be straight out of the Matty Bevilacqua mold -- pump-and-dump scammer who ratted out his associates to keep out of Club Fed, and eventually gravitated to Bannon, who barely bothers to conceal the late-night-infomercial aesthetic that underpins every one of his Wile E. Coyote scams. Overthrow the Pope? Check. Buy a medieval Italian castle, in order to establish some goofball Opus Dei warrior-monk training academy? Check. Say what you will, Steve-O's ambitions have come a long way since his bathtub crank days.

And now this money-laundering thing, which is guaranteed to unravel on at least a couple of high-level people. The thing is, a couple miles of wall did get built, and some of the money did move to the construction company -- you know, the North Dakota construction company that somehow won a billion-dollar contract to build a fucking wall across Texas. Did not realize that Texas had run out of construction companies.

Oddly, only about half of the $50M can be tracked so far. I'd probably check Fat Donnie's super PACs first, but that's me. I promise you that every single one of these schemes that gets uncovered, he and his shitbag family are wetting their beaks. And even if any of the money has been declared in those legendary tax returns, it's all in shell corps that will then have to be unraveled. They'll probably never get to the bottom of it all. Remember when Mossack Fonseca was a thing? Oh yeah, we had all those thieving high rollers dead to rights. Good times.

A fitting solution for all of this would be to throw the perpetrators in jail, recoup costs and heavy fines, and then use the money to tear down the wall and get the refugee families out of the for-profit rape camps these evil motherfuckers threw them into so long ago. But I'll be surprised if anyone actually goes to jail. Every day is Fitzmas in this country -- big crimes, big promises, very little outcome.

Travel Bans

I wouldn't worry too much about the travel bans. Another four years of this shit, and this rotting husk of a nation will be a place no dirty fur'ner would want to check out anyway. It will just be a place where the Saudis who own Trump and his shithead failson-in-law buy all the high-end real estate just to squat on it, and the relatives of Russian and Chinese oligarchs to come and have their anchor babies in Dear Leader's hotel rooms.

Shame Spiral

The collapse of empire continues unabated:  Li'l Nero's six-page manifesto, apparently copy-pasted directly from his Twitter feed. Hilarious. Exactly what this country deserves, a place where (among countless other daily signs of sheer wretchedness) kindergartners hold bake sales so their classmates can eat lunch. But hey, at least we can say Merry Christmas again, amirite? We all recall the dark years when people were dragged by the hair into the middle of the street and beaten severely for such things. It was on the internets, so it must be true.

Wait until the actual impeachment vote comes down tomorrow, or someone explains to him that during the impeachment process, the pardon power is suspended. Buckle in for the Christmas rage-tweet-palooza. A bottle of Jameson's would be good to have on hand.

Never let them forget, the politicians and the voters who continue to give their support to this thing:  this is what you support, this doddering, raving, preposterous old man who never earned an honest dollar nor gave a straight answer. Hang it around their necks for all time.

Space, Forced

Here's another interesting thread, a bit longer than the last, which I encourage you to check out, as it comes from someone with -- get this -- actual non-partisan expertise in an important technical field.

I am fairly agnostic on the idea of the "Space Force," as it turns out. The idea, as such, is at the very least reasonable, and based on some very long-standing premises, which predate space exploration and even this country:

• Whether we like it or not, whether we agree with it or not, at some point in the future, the arena in question will be explored more thoroughly, weaponized, and militarized.
• The policy of this country -- indeed, of any country with any standing for any significant period of time -- is to at least endeavor to stay as far ahead technologically as one's closest rivals.

So with these principles in mind -- it's going to happen, might as well get out in front of it -- the problem here is not the formation of this new branch of the military. Nor is it that there is no granular detail available as to what it will encompass; after all, there is no reason to show Xi Jinping your hand at any moment before absolutely necessary.

The problem is that it is clear that even the broadest of strokes have not yet been determined or even discussed. Certainly they have not been conveyed, or so much as hinted at. And yet we're already throwing tens or hundreds of billions of dollars at something that appears so far just to be a bunch of cheap swag festooned with some cheesy logo from an Ed Wood movie.

It is not at all a partisan or political assertion to simply point out that right here, right now, there are many other areas in more urgent need of that funding. Sending that ludicrous dunce out to Cooter's Holler every couple weeks to interject "Space Force!" over and over again, between hoots over her emails and such like, add nothing to the mix.

I alternate between wondering what the hell is wrong with the people whose enthusiastic buy-in is predicated on such a sad sales pitch, and wanting to get them on my mailing list so I can fleece them out of their Social Security checks.

It could actually be a good idea, given the right conception, development, and execution. Given the track record of these thieves and their gutless minions, though, it is entirely reasonable to assume that it's all just a boondoggle funneling tax dollars into whatever shady shell corp Fat Daddy and his failchildren have bought the most stock in.

Teflon Don

I couldn't have picked a better couple days to stay home sick from work, than yesterday and today, with the impeachment hearings going on in the background. Hoarse Whisperer has been doing a great play-by-play job throughout, so check it out if you're interested in more granular detail, and throw him a few shekels for his effort.

European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland is currently testifying, and as many live observers are noting, his demeanor is that of a man who is at peace with what he needs to do. He saw how lifelong ratfucker Roger Stone's time finally ran out last week. Stone is looking at fifty (50!) years in Club Fed, a life sentence. Paul Manafort is doing his stretch right now, and will be in his late seventies -- and broke like a muthafuckin' joke) by the time he's released.

Rudy Giuliani is in the midst of a very slow-motion process of being thrown under the proverbial bus. At 75 years of age and currently going through an expensive and messy divorce from Wife #3, Fruity Gee is surely aware that his best days are now and forever truly behind him. Even if he finds a way to weasel out of major trouble, he knows that he will only be accepted by people that he knows are scumbags. That's all he has left. That "America's Mayor" shit is long gone.

So Sondland sees all that and has adjusted his tack accordingly. He's just a standard doofus with way too much money who thought he'd buy his way into the in-crowd. Well, ya got in, Gordo. How's the weather?

Sondland is now dragging Giuliani and Mike Pompeo and Mick Mulvaney and Dear Leader himself into the ever-widening web of implications. Pompeo and Mulvaney have been trying to find a way to jump ship for months, and Gordo just shanked 'em both real good. They're balls-deep in this, and will be lucky if all they lose is their political careers.

I would only add a few "slightly larger picture" details that are being exposed more and more as this process works through:

• Ukraine is not a member of the European Union. So what exactly is Sondland's official role in all this? Why is he the mediator for these surreptitious transactions with a country not in his diplomatic portfolio? Not to mention the fact that Sondland is a certifiable dipshit -- he testifies that he took no notes of any of his conversations (but gee, he wishes he would have), and he literally held a discussion with POTUS out in the open at a restaurant in Ukraine, on an unsecured line, loud enough for everyone within earshot to overhear what Trump was saying. Again, if you wrote this into a spy novel or a James Bond script, you'd be laughed out of the pitch meeting. It's waaayyyyy too stupid to be remotely believable. And yet Gordo cheerfully attests to all that. Winning!
• Rudy Giuliani has no official role in the United States government at all. He is famously (infamously?) working "for free" on Trump's behalf. It should be clear by now why all that is extremely problematic. As cumbersome and tedious as the appointment-confirmation process might be -- especially to a STRAPPING MAN OF ACTION like Dear Leader -- all of this is why you have that process.
  
  Instead, you have a doddering freelancer, working on the direct behalf of another doddering freelancer, rather than that of, you know, the fucking United States of America. So it's not just that POTUS is explicitly using tools of bribery and extortion on a foreign leader to extract concessions that benefit him personally, it's that his pro bono henchman is subverting national security and foreign policy to work his own side-hustle with whichever Ukrainian oligarch-owned gas company wants to come around and do business.
• This is a case study in how the ongoing undermining of the foreign service corps will have national security repercussions for decades. These shitheads chased out all the competent non-partisan personnel, whose expertise is quiet but essential to day-to-day operations and actionable intel, and replaced them with dipshit lackeys, whose only role is to receive and deliver thick envelopes. The lackeys will be gone at some point in the near- to short-term. It will be very difficult, and take years, to round up a new cadre of professionals, and get them trained and deployed. In the meantime, we will have no operational presence to speak of, in many volatile regions. Feel safer now?
• You hate to use tired clichés such as "scratches the surface" or "tip of the iceberg" with this. It will become clearer when (if) the tax returns are made public. Ukraine is just a small example of how American foreign policy has been monetized -- not for the country's benefit, but for Trump and his family. The Saudis are happy to to just funnel money through the failson-in-law, and get whatever they want -- including American military personnel, who now are apparently mercenaries working for a medieval shithole. Turkey certainly gave him some consideration, in return for his abject betrayal of the Kurds, who fought side-by-side with Americans, and are now being mercilessly slaughtered as you read this. The other side of that coin is the shakedown protection racket, which we just tried on the South Koreans yesterday, walking out of "negotiations" per Genius Q. Dealmaker's super-great how-to manual on MAKING THAT DEAL. Instead of having their protection fees quadrupled overnight, the South Koreans opted instead to sign a security agreement -- wait for it -- with China. And so the Asian century continues apace, without us.
  
  But the point is, Ukraine is just one part of the elephant here -- the trunk, the tail, an ear, whatever. There's a lot more to be uncovered, and the inquiry is probably going to have to be limited in time and scope, for various political considerations. I dunno, if only someone had proposed that this process be started MONTHS EARLIER.

Anyway, the real problem here is that the Republican party politicians, and their disgusting, increasingly anti-American base, won't budge for any of this. Again, you could have indisputably real video of Trump literally robbing a bank and shooting everyone in it -- guards, tellers, customers, his fellow robbers -- and they'd find an excuse for it.

All of the above is a problem for the nation, just as a going concern. But the stubborn obstructionism of Republican politicians, too terrified or stupid to simply observe what's in front of them and do what they know is the right thing, that is a clear and imminent danger. And you're never going to undo the brainwashing of the Fox cult, even if you found a way to pull the plug on the network tomorrow. That damage is done.

Fakebook Is Not Your Friend

Zuckerberg Inc. is planning to lease about 1.3 million square feet of space at Hudson Yards, the project that once had Dear Leader's name attached to it, and now is being helmed by Stephen Ross, owner of a lot of other properties, including the Miami Dolphins, Soulcycle, the Drone Racing League (it's real, and actually fun to watch) -- and is one of Dear Leader's biggest fundraisers.

I don't know what it is that compels these people, who can do literally anything they want in life, to decide to be terrible humans, to become the minions and handmaidens of people who are even more terrible. Life is too short to keep asking why. All any of us can do is shun them as completely as possible. It should be clear by now that they did exactly that to all of us a long, long time ago.

Screwing the Mooch

Apparently Trump bootlicker Anthony Scaramucci wasn't quite deferential enough the other night on Bill Maher's show, so he has of course been tossed under the proverbial bus (though, heh, Mooch is so short -- how short is he? -- he could have just as well been tossed under a Matchbox car, amirite? Bazinga!). Ahem.

Look. As tempting as it is to dump the we-told-you-so boiling oil on these dimbulbs when they finally have their come-to-Jebus moments, I'll refrain from it somewhat. Like it or not, Mooch does have a measure of that funny, self-effacing, quick-on-his-feet charisma that has probably gotten him where he is in the world of finance weaseldom.

What's annoying is the way Mooch soft-pedals his excommunication:  Recently [Trump] has said things that divide the country in a way that is unacceptable. Oh, really? Just recently, you say? This has been his schtick for decades, and certainly since day one of his candidacy. The establishment rubes who harrumphed at him on style points and hoped he'd "grow into the presidency" (translation:  tax cuts for billionaires, just be slightly less of a gaping asshole) were quickly and grandly disappointed to see that, nope, what you see really is what you get with this fucker. There is no second gear. He has always, always been like this.

And at no point in the nearly three years since the election [Christ, it only seems like ten thousand years. -- Ed.] has he even pretended to try to reach out to the majority of American citizens who did not vote for them. Hell, Obama won 2008 by a fucking landslide, and he at least made a few relatively sincere gestures here and there.

Trump could have proposed a grand infrastructure project, on the scale of the Tennessee Valley Authority or some such, created tons of good jobs, made some badly needed improvements across the country, maybe even shored up some of the areas out in Real 'murka that are taking it in the shorts from the Great Climate Change Hoax. Nope, he decided that he'd rather piss on China's head, and dump fifty billion dollars into Nebraska and Iowa, while farmers watch their harvest rot in warehouses, because they literally can't recoup their investment by selling the product. Fuckin' genius, man.

Scaramucci also mentioned on Maher's show that he (Scaramucci) has a cousin with a glass shop who is being severely impacted by the trade war, and is on the verge of losing his business. However the guy voted, that truly sucks. What I'm curious about is, will he vote to continue these hare-brained economic policies, or has he had enough of Duh Best Economy Evuh? Seriously, I have no interest in rubbing it in on these folks, but we all keep asking what will it take for them to realize he's a clown, and turn on him in 2020? This would help fine-tune the approach to that important question.

People are certainly allowed -- even encouraged, especially in this political climate -- to evolve and change their minds, to move forward and acknowledge that maybe they learned something. So welcome aboard the pain train, Moochie. Just please let's not pretend that he all of a sudden turned into a bad guy. He's always been a vile person, and eating shitty fast food doesn't make you a populist, any more than rubes and marks repeating that tired catechism make it so.